An Upstart Mayor, a Shaky Future

By Paul A. Witteman/San Francisco

Early on the day Arthur Christ Agnos was elected the 37th mayor of San Francisco, a violent storm unexpectedly swept across the city, dumping hail, downing power lines, flooding streets. For a brief time chaos reigned. But shortly after the polls closed in last week's runoff election, it was apparent that a bigger gale had been spawned by Agnos himself. The candidate, once a little-known state assemblyman, blew away John Molinari, president of San Francisco's board of supervisors, with an overwhelming 70% of the vote. A voluble former social worker who arrived in San Francisco from Springfield, Mass., in 1966, Agnos, 49, becomes the first non-native to run the city in 40 years. Ever mindful of his outsider's background, Agnos declares, "The center of power in this town has shifted."

That shift came dramatically and unexpectedly. The representative of the city's unfashionable eastern district for more than a decade, Agnos badly trailed Front Runner Molinari in early polls and fund raising. But tactless campaign mailings and a poor television-debate performance hurt Molinari. Agnos' superb grass-roots organization, as well as his advocacy of rent controls and affordable housing, turned the campaign around. Agnos nearly outpolled all ten other candidates in November's general election to set up last week's landslide.

Whether Agnos will build on his success depends on his ability to respond to some daunting challenges. A deficit conservatively estimated at $86 million, a shrinking corporate community and an increasing death toll from AIDS have dulled the city's upbeat image. Almost as bad for longtime residents has been the emergence of Los Angeles as California's pre-eminent city.

Each week brings new evidence that the balance of power is inexorably shifting south. Merrill Lynch recently picked Los Angeles as the place to service its Pacific Rim clients interested in California investments. "My instinct was to go to San Francisco," says Hong Kong-based T.M. Deford, director of the brokerage's Asia Pacific regional office. "But our study showed that the money was going to Los Angeles." Says Agnos' predecessor, Dianne Feinstein, with a bit of resignation: "Los Angeles has 15 million people. We have six million."

To be accurate, San Francisco has only 725,000 residents. But the images of cable cars climbing past high-rises, a densely settled Chinatown and a skyline packed tightly into a nest of hills suggest a metropolis of greater heft. In recent years, however, the city's problems have fallen into sharper and more painful focus.

Even before Feinstein became mayor in November 1978, following the city hall murders of Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, San Francisco and its environs had developed a reputation that would give heartburn to a Chamber of Commerce. First there was the 1967 Summer of Love, with its easy exchange of drugs and sex in Haight-Ashbury. Then in 1973 came the racially motivated Zebra killings; Agnos, who was seriously wounded after leaving a neighborhood political meeting, was one of the gunman's 18 randomly chosen victims. Next followed the kidnaping of Newspaper Heiress Patty Hearst and the 1978 mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, to which Jim Jones had moved his cult followers from a "people's temple" in the center of San Francisco.

At the same time, external forces have conspired to sap the city's corporate strength. In the past six years 23 of the city's 50 largest public companies have disappeared in a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. Ill-advised loans to Latin American countries backfired on BankAmerica Corp., once the nation's largest financial institution. The bank has eliminated almost 30% of its work force and auctioned off moneymaking assets; still it has not turned a profit in three years. Even Standard Oil, the state's largest company, has retrenched in its headquarters town. The decline of the city's corporate and charitable base occurred at the same time voters were putting restrictions on further commercial growth, including last month's referendum rejecting plans for a new downtown baseball stadium. "The city is not antibusiness," says the mayor- elect, whose platform attempts to hew to a fine line between the concerns of his neighborhood constituents and the power brokers of old San Francisco. "The people just want to plan the growth."

But the biggest problem facing Agnos, one he characterizes as a "human and possibly fiscal catastrophe for the city," is the accelerating toll from AIDS. A large percentage of San Francisco's gay male population will die of the disease over the next decade. "Everybody who is infected will get sick," says Dr. John Ziegler, director of the AIDS clinical research center of the University of California at San Francisco. "Everyone who gets sick will die." A highly regarded Berkeley study suggests that as many as 52% of the city's 70,000 to 100,000 gay men have been exposed to the virus; from 4,000 to 8,000 people will become ill during Agnos' four-year term. Randy Shilts, author of And the Band Played On, a chilling chronicle of the disease, says gays in San Francisco are facing an "unrelenting tragedy of increasing proportions."

Agnos, whose sponsorship of AIDS funding legislation in Sacramento earned him strong gay support at the polls, says bluntly, "The city has to get help from the state and the Federal Government, period." The costs of the epidemic to the city have grown from $184,000 in 1981 to $17.5 million this year. | Fortunately, San Francisco seems better prepared than other U.S. cities to cope with the coming flood of medical needs. Organizations such as the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Hospice and the Shanti project have developed nationally renowned networks of volunteers to care for the afflicted.

Gays are not the only constituency Agnos must serve. Right under the noses of the white establishment, San Francisco has turned into a city of Pacific Rim immigrants. The Chinese community alone numbers 150,000, the Philippine 70,000. Add to those groups a spicy mixture of Japanese, Thais, Laotians, Cambodians, Vietnamese and Hmong, plus contingents from Pacific Island outposts, and the city that Columnist Herb Caen likes to call "Baghdad by the Bay" more closely resembles Hong Kong East. Says New York-born and Hong Kong- reared Leslie Tang, 32, a commercial developer: "We don't have the political representation that our presence would warrant. We have been accused of being invisible, but there will be a rise in Asian political activity."

The influx of new blood and, to a lesser extent, new money has begun to rebuild the city's business base. According to Dun & Bradstreet, San Francisco leads the nation in business start-ups and, critically, in the survival rate among those start-ups. In 1980 Brandy Ho, an immigrant from Hong Kong two decades earlier, opened his first restaurant in Chinatown. Now Brandy Ho's Hunan Food employs two of his brothers, their wives and a dozen others. Next spring he will open his second outlet. "San Francisco is the best place I've ever been," says Ho.

Tourism constitutes the underpinnings of an economy that still boasts the lowest unemployment figures in the state. Eight million people come each year to attend conventions or huddle on Fisherman's Wharf on cold summer nights. The city generates $2.8 billion annually from its visitors. Such extensive dependence worries outgoing Mayor Feinstein. "You can't sit on the scenery and wait for things to happen," she says. Agnos says that is perfectly clear to him as well. He has plans to clean up the increasingly seedy Fisherman's Wharf for the benefit of local fishermen and more actively promote the city as a corporate center. "We're not as big as New York, and we're not as spread out as Los Angeles," he says. "We are a family-sized city with a bright economic and residential future." That will be so only if Agnos can solve the considerable problems of the present.